The Last of Us Part II: The Structure Is the Argument

Naughty Dog released The Last of Us Part II in June 2020 to the loudest, most divided reaction any first-party PlayStation game has generated this decade — review-bombing campaigns, genuine critical acclaim, and years of continued argument that a 2024 remaster and a No Return roguelike mode haven’t settled. Revisiting it now, with enough distance to separate the discourse from the design, the case for the game rests on one decision that most of that discourse skated past: the structure. This is a revenge story told by forcing you to play, at length, as the person your revenge is aimed at. That’s not a twist. It’s the entire argument, delivered mechanically rather than in dialogue.

Ellie’s half is built to feel earned

The first half of the campaign follows Ellie into Seattle hunting the people responsible for a death that reframes everything the first game built between her and Joel. Combat here is tightened considerably from the original — stealth is more viable, enemies call each other by name when they find a friend’s body, and the game wants you to feel each kill’s weight by making the aftermath specific rather than abstract. It’s brutal, well-paced, and it’s constructed so that Ellie’s fury reads as understandable, even righteous, because the game has spent hours making sure you share her reasons for it before you’re ever asked to question them.

That construction matters, because the entire second half depends on you having genuinely felt Ellie’s side first. Naughty Dog isn’t hedging its bets by making the revenge ambiguous from the start; it commits fully to Ellie’s perspective, lets you feel the catharsis of each kill land the way she needs it to, and only then pulls the perspective away.

Two factions, two systems of belief

Seattle’s fighting is split between two occupying forces — the Washington Liberation Front, a militia descended from a former resistance movement, and the Seraphites, an isolationist religious sect known to the WLF as Scars. Both Ellie and Abby move through territory controlled by each faction at different points, and the game is careful to give both groups internal logic rather than treating either as a generic enemy horde: WLF patrols talk about supply runs and old grudges, Seraphite scouts speak in the sect’s own liturgical cadence, and named individuals on both sides die with the same weight the game gives Ellie’s or Abby’s own losses. That even-handedness is structural too — it’s the same argument the Ellie/Abby split makes, run again at the scale of whole factions rather than two individuals, reinforcing that the game’s thesis about violence isn’t a one-off narrative trick confined to its two leads.

Lev, Yara, and the third perspective

Abby’s section introduces Lev and Yara, two Seraphite siblings fleeing their own community after Lev’s refusal to conform to its gender expectations, and their story runs alongside Abby’s own disillusionment with the WLF’s brutality. It’s a third vantage point on the same occupied-Seattle conflict, neither of the two factions the player has spent the game fighting for or against, and it does real work broadening the argument beyond a two-hander: nobody in this story, on either side of Ellie’s revenge, is only a combatant. Lev in particular becomes the emotional counterweight to Abby’s violence in the second half, giving her arc a reason to change that doesn’t depend on the player simply forgiving her for the game’s sake.

Abby’s half is the actual thesis

Roughly halfway through, the game rewinds its own timeline and hands you Abby — the same person Ellie has spent hours hunting — and makes you play through the same days in Seattle from her side, with her own found family, her own losses, her own reasons that mirror Ellie’s structurally almost beat for beat. It’s a bet that most narrative games wouldn’t take: that a player who’s just spent five hours enjoying the satisfaction of Ellie’s violence will sit through another five hours built to dismantle that satisfaction from the other direction, meeting the people Ellie has been killing as characters with their own interior lives before the story asks you to kill some of Ellie’s people in turn.

The mechanical repetition is the point. Abby’s stealth and combat systems are close cousins of Ellie’s — same core toolkit, similar encounter shapes — precisely so the player recognises the same violence being asked of them from a different seat. A story could make this argument in cutscenes alone. Part II makes you enact it twice, which is a much harder thing to dismiss as someone else’s morality lecture, because your own hands did both halves.

Why the backlash misread the structure

Much of the initial backlash treated the Abby sections as a betrayal of what players had signed up for — an unwanted character forced into a game about someone else. That reaction is understandable as a gut response and also, on the design’s own terms, exactly the reaction the structure is built to produce and then work against. Wanting Abby’s chapters to end so you can get back to Ellie is not a failure to engage with the game; it’s the emotional state the design is counting on, because that impatience is Ellie’s own impatience for revenge, mirrored back at the player through pacing rather than dialogue. The discomfort of being asked to care about Abby is not a side effect of the pacing; it’s the mechanism. A structure this deliberately uncomfortable was never going to be universally embraced on arrival, and revisiting it years later — once the shock of the ask has faded — makes it easier to see the choice as considered rather than as the miscalculation some of the loudest launch-week reaction assumed it was.

None of that requires agreeing the game is flawless. The back half runs long, some of the open-area Seattle sections dilute pacing the tighter early chapters establish, and a small number of late-game reveals lean on coincidence harder than the writing elsewhere allows itself. A side trip to Santa Barbara late in the campaign, following Ellie years after Seattle, stretches the runtime further still, and it’s the one structural choice that doesn’t earn its length the way the Ellie/Abby split does — it exists mainly to deliver the game’s final confrontation rather than to make a comparable argument of its own. But those are craft criticisms of execution, distinct from the structural argument, which holds up as one of the more genuinely ambitious things a big-budget action game has attempted with its own runtime.

Combat that remembers what it did to you

Enemy AI reacting to a fallen ally by name is a small technical detail with a large emotional effect: a WLF soldier who screams “Nora’s down!” and turns to search for you personally is harder to shoot dismissively than an anonymous silhouette, and it’s a direct extension of the game’s structural argument into its most mechanical system. Naughty Dog didn’t need enemies with names for the stealth-action loop to function; the loop would have worked with silent, generic opponents the way most stealth games use them. Giving them names is a cost the studio paid on purpose, because a combat system that lets you forget you’re killing people would have undercut everything the Abby chapters are built to argue.

The technical case, briefly

Beyond structure, the animation and mocap work remains a genuine industry high point — facial performance capture detailed enough to carry silent reaction shots that would need dialogue in almost any other game, and traversal and combat systems that integrate stealth, gunplay, and environmental interaction more fluidly than the original game managed. Gustavo Santaolalla returns to score the sequel, and his sparse, guitar-led themes do exactly what they did in the first game: withhold music from most of the runtime so that the handful of moments it does appear land as clearly earned rather than as constant emotional underlining. None of that is what makes Part II worth revisiting on its own terms, though; plenty of technically accomplished games don’t argue anything. This one does, and the argument is carried by how the campaign is built, not by any single scene inside it.

What to play now

The 2024 remaster on PS5 adds a roguelike survival mode, No Return, built from the same combat systems as short, replayable encounters — a smart way to let the mechanics breathe outside the narrative structure they were built to serve, and worth trying once the campaign’s argument has had time to settle. For a sequel that talks a great deal without matching this kind of structural ambition, Jay’s revisit of God of War Ragnarok is a useful contrast in how much a big narrative sequel can lean on dialogue instead of design. Jay’s piece on Silent Hill 2 and the fog that carries its guilt is worth reading alongside this one too — both games use their central mechanical metaphor to make an argument about guilt that the script alone couldn’t carry.

Spoilers below

The death that sets Ellie’s revenge in motion is Joel’s, killed by Abby near the start of the game in retaliation for Joel’s actions at the end of the first game — the choice to save Ellie by wiping out the Fireflies’ one hope of a cure, an act Abby’s father, the Fireflies’ lead surgeon, never survives. The final confrontation, set years later on a beach in Santa Barbara rather than in Seattle, ends with Ellie sparing Abby’s life after nearly drowning her, a decision that leaves Ellie’s specific act of revenge unresolved in the way the entire structure has been building toward — landing on a recognition that killing Abby was never going to give her back what she lost, in place of the cathartic ending the setup seemed to promise.